Shotgun's Rapid Transition to AI-Driven Solutions with cnvrg.io

Shotgun is a global live entertainment solution that aims to revolutionize the way party planners and party lovers interact. It is a ticketing SaaS that allows producers to structure their event projects with a set of tools to maximize the sales of tickets and increase their audience. For the public, Shotgun deploys different platforms that respond to the new consumption habits of live entertainment, turning going-out people into a community. With over 2 million monthly visitors, Shotgun offers a great community and event discovery experience for event goers, and an exceptional experience for event planners that increases sales, and expands reach. Shotgun’s suite of technology tools enable a seamless experience for all of their customers.

Shotgun, a global live entertainment solution, was seeking to integrate AI into their platform to enhance their services. However, they faced several challenges. Firstly, they had limited experience in AI and needed an efficient, flexible, and intuitive AI platform that would enable their small team of engineers to deliver AI quickly. Secondly, they found most platforms to be fragmented and constrained to only using the compatible computing vendors or tools. Their first AI project was to implement a recommender system that would take user history from various sources to offer advanced recommendations for events based on user’s event and music tastes. The system also required quick recommendations with a cache solution to give users real-time and relevant recommendations. As Shotgun embarked on their AI journey, they needed a platform that was flexible and scalable, so that their team could quickly build and support new AI innovations as they grew.

After evaluating various cloud vendor platforms, Shotgun chose cnvrg.io for its comprehensive and flexible platform. cnvrg.io was intuitive and simple enough for Shotgun's immediate needs in the early stages of their AI journey, but could also deliver on future needs as their AI maturity advances and as their team grows. The cnvrg.io platform had a good balance enabling the AI team to build complex and custom AI, while also simplifying MLOps tasks so they could focus on innovation. Shotgun was able to use the simple pre-made recommender system AI Blueprint and customize it with their own code and data. cnvrg.io took care of all of the engineering tasks like scheduling, pipeline creation, and retraining that otherwise would have required advanced engineering knowledge. Additionally, Shotgun was able to leverage AI optimized resources easily via native integration to the Intel Developer Cloud.

• In just one month, Shotgun was able to onboard to cnvrg.io and build and optimize their recommender system for production. Shotgun accelerated their time to value 5x. What would have taken Shotgun at least 6 months to deliver manually was done in 1 month using cnvrg.io by reducing the time needed to research and validate MLOps best practices. With cnvrg.io, Shotgun was able to easily adopt MLOps with confidence, out of the box. The solution enabled them to bypass the technical debt of operationalizing models, and focus on developing new innovations that will make them more competitive in the market.

• Accelerated time to AI value from 6 months to 1 month

• Simplification of scheduler reduced need for MLOps engineer

• Reduced cost of AI by enabling cost effective computing and need to hire AI talent